Hey Teacher, Decode This!

Wow - September is flying by!  Soccer season has started and I have 2 glorious days of peace and quiet every week where both kids are in school at the same time!  Of course a good mom would never publicly call those days "glorious."  Instead, she would wear a huge smile while she recounted how quickly her kids are growing up and how long those hours of separation seem.  Lucky for you, I'm not a good mom...I'm a real mom! 

Now I would be lying if I said that Emery starting kindergarten didn't hit me like a ton of bricks! You see, I've been dropping him off at preschool for over two years and I naively thought that it prepared me to leave him at his new school and never look back! What I didn't count on was just how small a kindergartner looks walking into a school next to 5th graders. I'm now totally one of those moms who breaks stringent car-line rules and parks until I see that Emery has safely made it the whole way into the building. Trust me that in "suburban mom land" the only thing that would make me look more rebellious to my peers is two full tattoo sleeves and a Hot Topic outfit. When the school car-line patrol (that could easily rival air traffic control at PDX) notices me, I can see their uneasy looks at each other while they use covert baseball signals and reach for their walkie talkies.  I'm not kidding when I say that one of their bullet-pointed rules is, "You have 10 seconds to get out!"  But I can honestly appreciate that if they run a car-line in that controlled of a manner, then there is probably a whole lot of learning getting done in those classrooms.

The other major thing I was unprepared for was getting used to a new teacher who reminds me of a 26 year old version of myself. While she was talking 100 miles an hour and proudly proclaiming her credentials which happened to include my alma mater, I literally had visions of her smuggling peppermint schnapps and hot chocolate into a football game at 11:00 am after a week of skipping classes.  Seriously, the coffee on her desk was starting to look a little suspect.  I'm not judging that though - it takes a brave soul to face twenty 5 and 6 years olds all day! Even if her coffee were "special", I wouldn't blame her!

Of course while I was listening to her spiel on her personal educational philosophy on parents night, I was thinking what every parent thinks; "I wonder if she knows how special my kid is? I mean, I wonder if she knows that he's not regular special like the other kids....he's advanced special"  I wanted to raise my hand and ask but another bullet-pointed rule the school made clear was "no child-specific questions on parent's night."  Lucky for me, Emery's teacher had given each parent a questionnaire to fill out about their child where we could all brag explain why our kid is advanced special. Do not be fooled people, this is not a questionnaire....it's a test!  This is how a teacher decodes it:

First to turn yours in = Type A parent.
Not enough description = Under involved parent
Too much description = Over involved parent.
Last to turn yours in = Disorganized parent.

And since I was so sure his teacher had CIA level decoding skills, I decided to give her my own little test!  We were asked to write down 5 words that best describes our kid. 

What I wrote: Sensitive
Decoded: This actually served more as a warning than a descriptive characteristic of Emery.  He's sensitive in that if you ask him to do something he should be doing anyway (ie - picking up his own mess), he will turn on the tears and use some sort of backwards voodoo logic that makes you feel like you stifled his creative process and prohibited him from freely growing in an environment without limitations. Trust me Mrs. Teacher, you will be cleaning up Emery's mess while you apologize to him that your people oppressed his in the 15th century.

What I wrote: Social
Decoded: Good luck getting him to shut his mouth....ever. The kids talks. A lot. Always. And if you happen to get a word in edgewise where you can politely ask him to be quiet he will say, "Okay, I'm being quiet now.  Do you hear me being quiet? Do I get a prize?"

What I wrote: Analytical
Decoded:  Get ready  to answer a whole lot of "Why?" questions! Why does red mean stop? Why does green mean go? Why is the sky blue? Why is the grass green? Why does mommy drink so much?

What I wrote: Caring
Decoded:  As in "He cares about his video games." But since this questionnaire is a test, I can't tell you that I let him play video games! I can assure you, however, that when it comes to Skylanders Emery cares a great deal!

What I wrote: Focused
Decoded:  He will not hear you when you tell him it's time to do something different than what he is already doing.  And if he does hear you, he won't look at you.  And if he does look at you, he will pretend he is deaf and furrow his eyebrows into a question like you are speaking a lost language. And if you give his 5 more minutes, he will hear 20. And if you figure out how to stop this cycle - please let me know!

Honestly, Emery is a great kid!  But like every kid, he's complex.  And I know that right when his teacher figures him out, he'll be on to first grade with a new teacher!  Am I in for this same process every year for the next 12 years?  All of you more experienced moms are probably laughing at me right now!  That's okay, my turn will come....

Looking sharp next to the ladies!

New Rules for Pinterest & Instagram

There really is no natural way to segue back into a blog that I've been ignoring for almost a year, is there? Every great once in awhile (and I'm using "once in awhile" as a hyperbole here), I get asked why I don't blog as much.  And of course my response is always, "Well mom....I'm busy raising your grandkids!" I may have explained this before, but when I started writing this whole thing years ago I had this vision of a virtual scrapbook to share our life with the world as so many other moms do.  Every picture of our daily outings would be perfectly staged highlighting all of the amazing fun our family has when we're not even trying! We'd look adorably candid in our matching outfits while we walked hand in hand through wheat fields, on railroad tracks, and in front of rustic barns, all while we drank from mason jars with striped straws. Eventually, I was going to have it all printed into a book so that I could give it to my children as they left for college to remind them how wonderful their childhood had been!

Then, one day, I realized with a giant sense of freedom that our life isn't Pinterest or Etsy....and that's okay. For every picture I post of Emery smiling with a new Karate belt, I could post another 20 of me pulling him off his game of Skylanders while he screams, "I don't want to go there today! I want to play video gaaaaaaaammmmmmees!" And realistically, the chance of the kids and I having coordinating outfits is slim to none unless princess Belle clothes come in adult size or I decide to start sporting Crocs on a daily basis. I don't even own mason jars! So instead, my blog took a left turn where I started writing about how crazy my kids are and about how they live in a world where up is down, left is right, and my prayers start with a simple plea for sanity. And that, after all, doesn't make a very good "off to college" present now, does it?!

Speaking of Pinterest, if I owned that website (and it's been stated before that Satan does to which I totally concur) I would require that every craft had a difficulty rating and a picture of the mess that will be left behind in it's wake.  Then I could more realistically decide if digging out a Micheal's coupon and dragging two kids through a store where they get distracted by Christmas decorations in July and start screaming out their list to Santa while I'm rummaging through ribbon bins to decorate some cake stand in hopes of getting one good Instagram shot might be worth it or not. And speaking on Instagram, if owned that site I would require that the 45 shots everyone takes before they finally get one that's post-worthy would have to be displayed as a full succession.  Then, I think, we would all feel more like we are on the same chaotic page in life!?  Here...let me be the first to be a little more honest:

Anyway, I think I've reached a place where I can accept that maybe if I put more work back into this blog,  an eventual bound copy may not be the best gift for Emery and Lulu's twenties.  But do you know what?  It might be a good gift for their thirties when they have a family of their own.  I know I had that moment when it dawned on me exactly what I had put my parents through for 18 years.  At least my kids would know that I laughed (sometimes) while I waded through 2 feet of toys in a messy play room and (eventually) smiled when they drew on our walls in pink highlighter.  So here's to school starting and finally having some time to write down and laugh at imperfection once again!  Until then...I'll be hunting down obscure school supplies (Retractable dry erase markers?  Are caps really that hard to put back on?) and counting down the days until I have a three hour window to clean the house without a new mess following 2 feet behind me.

Have a great week!

Jenny